How should your organization measure role coverage and skill gaps?
Brent Ross is Customer Success Manager at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Learn about Ibbaka’s role coverage and skill gap solution
Ibbaka Talent is evolving to include power functionality to help organizations understand skill gaps and role coverage. In this post, I’ll explore how we think about measuring these vital indicators of readiness for your organization to take on growth, plan succession or to deliver new offerings.
What are skill gaps and how do they relate to role coverage?
If you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with the concept of skill gaps at an individual level. These are gaps in knowledge, skill or ability that affect ability to perform in a current role, or in another role the person is interested in performing.
Skill gaps at an organization level arise from the relationship between a group of individuals relative to skill sets bundled into roles.
Roles make sense as a first level of aggregation framing and analyzing skill gaps. Doing helps leaders answer five critical questions:
Who should I assign a role to?
Do I have the people I need to fill the roles I need to achieve my goals?
Where should we invest in learning initiatives or content?
Who should I train?
Who should I hire?
Employing a skill management platform to understand role coverage moves the analysis beyond head counts of people with a particular job title into an understanding of who in a given set of people can cover a role, based on their skills.
What are the key elements to measure in role coverage and skill gap analysis?
Our approach to measuring skill gaps can be summarized by five P’s:
Priority: What are the skills we most need to measure? What are the roles that require those skills?
Presence: Do one or more individuals in the group of people you are considering have the skill(s)?
Proficiency: What is the target proficiency we want people to have for the skill in different roles, or for different competencies?
ImPortance: How critical is the skill to different roles? Is it must-have, should-have, or a nice-to have?
Peer Assessment: How are gathering objective data on the skill level of any one individual?
Once you’ve prioritized the skill sets you for which you want to measure skill gaps and role coverage, the first step is almost always a self-assessment. That said, self-assessment data is known to be not completely reliable when it comes to determining proficiency in a skill.
Over time, you need a way of collecting peer assessment data that is more than just an average of opinions. Ibbaka Talent solves this challenge with our proprietary SkillRank™ AI, which aggregates and weights assessments based on the skill levels of the people giving the assessment. The AI is designed not only to weed out gratuitous ratings, but also ratings that are disingenuous.
Acting on role coverage and skill gap analysis
Once you have the roles and skills designed and the initial assessments complete it is time to dig into the aggregate data.
There is one more piece we need to start making decisions as the result of an analysis - capacity targets.
Roles are the logical place to start for setting capacity targets. You may also want to set targets for behaviours or competencies that represent smaller bundles of skills that are critical across the organization.
In our upcoming release, Ibbaka Talent will allow you to set capacity targets to make sure that you not only have people with the right skills in the right roles, but that you will have enough people to achieve your goals.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how we help customers build competency models that allow for this type of analysis.
Why do you want to understand skill gaps and role coverage? Please take our short survey to let us know, as well as to receive a summary of insights from the survey when we complete it.